Essays

07/11/2021

Who is dad?

Dad said he wants to be a sexy pearl diver. He says he wants to swim in the ocean. He just doesn't want to die doing it. But Mom said he'd die if he fell off the bed. Dad is not going to get out of this room. I think that. Mom calls us to supper. My stomach is ready to start boiling. She goes to get a cup. I hear Dad's voice down the hall. He's asking for something. Mom comes back in and says she thinks he needs a trach. She puts the phone on the side table and hands him a can of soup. She looks at me. https://6b.eleuther.ai #thepolyxsupershow

10/05/2021

Help me pay my groceries.

Purchase a direct image download.

First and as an important aside: I use "Stripe" as a payment processing service, (implemented via the "Cart Plugin" of the "Koken Photo Publishing Server Software" hosted here in Berlin, Germany) - which is, to my best knowledge, a european, safe and secure payment processing service. BUT - the way payment processing is implemented on my site (Koken etc.) - things do not comply to Strong Customer Authentication as required by european laws. So - things work a little like in a grocery store, where you can buy things up to a certain amount because your credit card holding bank allows you to do so - or not. It depends ... please read more on this here, especially the part on Payments below 30 Euro:

https://stripe.com/en-se/guides/strong-customer-authentication

Each purchase from my site is a single transaction, nothing recurring like an abonnement, even if prices will always be the same for each item- but may change at any time below the thresholds given. Well, this depends a little on what's going on in the grocery store :)

I hope these ways and transactions find confidence - as they do for me.

So you purchased something? Great ! - Instantly dowloaded Image data should in almost all cases be good to go to any printing service of your choosing. Feel free to contact me via email in case you need any help on putting things together for best printing results . Creating a 300 dpi A-Formatted .pdf of an item isn't too much hand work (for me, but a hell to automate).

I case you do so I keep asking one question up front: would you mind sending me a photo of the final print in your intended setting ?

This would be a truly satisfying completion of the art work.

Thank you !

And best wishes - Benedikt

31/03/2021

Time After Corona

Will be citing - what?

Your Money My Life Goodbye, by Robert Ashley

An opera commissioned by Bayerisher Rundfunk Munich's Hörspiel und Medienkunst department about an internationally renowned swindler, who almost took down the European and American banking system. Featuring the voices of Robert Ashley, Sam Ashley, Thomas Buckner, Jackie Humbert, and Joan La Barbara. Recorded and mixed by Tom Hamilton.

From the Artist:

Your Money My Life Goodbye is one of forty-nine vocal-ensemble pieces of various lengths (from 10 minutes to 90 minutes or more) that can be used in many kinds of combinations to make an opera for stage, for radio or for television. Any of the combinations go under the title of the "opera," The Immortality Songs. When any of the pieces are performed separately, as in Your Money My Life Goodbye for Bayerischer Rundfunk, they take their individual titles. I have finished seven of the compositions. It looks like a lifetime of work. Hence, the title. In all of the forty-nine compositions some aspect of the musical structure (or many aspects of the musical structure) derive directly from the English language of the libretto. This process of derivation can be secretive and arcane (the music based, for instance, on grammatical structures or on the probability of the recurrence of certain syllables) or, as in Your Money My Life Goodbye, open and obvious. I think that the open and obvious approach - in this case, matching the syllables of the English (and the German) to the rhythm of the title-line, and matching the voice choices to the occurrence of the "characters" in the text - is a good solution to the "light-hearted" nature of the text. The story is simple. A woman responds to an invitation to attend a high-school reunion by sending her son, because she is incapacitated for some unknown reason. In describing her son, we get the idea that he is a high-level "intelligence agent" (a spy). A sort of James Bond character. The woman writes that her son's wife will not attend the reunion, because she is recently dead, either from suicide or murder. The son's wife is described in great detail from various newspaper articles. She was an internationally renowned swindler, who almost took down the European and American banking system. She was a successful entrepreneur. Your Money My Life Goodbye doesn't take this seriously at all. Everybody is crazy. -- Robert Ashley, 1998

http://www.lovely.com/titles/cd1005.html

http://www.robertashley.org

16/02/2019

Concept for a Sound Art Work

How Does Canny Edge Detection Sound ?

A sonification of the OpenGL implementation of Brad Larson’s “GPUImage Canny Edge Detection Implementation” which applies the edge detection process described by John Canny in “Canny, J., A Computational Approach To Edge Detection, IEEE Trans. Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence, 8(6):679–698, 1986” and implemented in OpenGL ES by “A. Ensor, S. Hall. GPU-based Image Analysis on Mobile Devices. Proceedings of Image and Vision Computing New Zealand 2011.”

“It starts with a conversion to luminance, followed by an accelerated 9-hit Gaussian blur. A Sobel operator is applied to obtain the overall gradient strength in the blurred image, as well as the direction (in texture sampling steps) of the gradient. A non-maximum suppression filter acts along the direction of the gradient, highlighting strong edges that pass the threshold and completely removing those that fail the lower threshold. Finally, pixels from in-between these thresholds are either included in edges or rejected based on neighboring pixels.”

18/01/2019

The Unit Model - Winds Contribution

15/01/2019

I can‘t sell you Creativity

... and I doubt anybody should or could do so. Honestly, what do you think money can buy you? Come back later... with brands deleted. Live is about you - and a pain in the ass. Get used to it...

13/01/2019

Experience Expanded

Again, how develop a voice that expands experience ?

Let’s say Voice is the culmination of inward and outward energies...just wait - can I take a short cut here and simply ask my body for a felt sense of this question about voice expanding experience ?

The felt sense

Gendlin writes: „First there is a kind of bodily awareness that profoundly influences our lives and that can help us reach personal goals. So little attention has been paid to this mode of awareness that there are no ready made words to describe it , and I have had to coin my own term: felt sense. And second that a felt sense will shift if you approach it in the right way. It will change even as you are making contact with it. When the felt sense of a situation changes, you change and, therefore, so does your life.“

(Chapter three, „Focusing - how to gain...“ Eugene T. Gendlin)

09/01/2019

Creativity Assist, Focusing, Past

I assist others in their process of creating works of art - art, that communicates a meaningful story to themselves and others. In that context assisting means practicing conscious silence. Stop making your sense, see the other, hear the other, deep listening...

remember when for the first time I tried to hire - after finishing acting school, done being an actor, it was a scary shit being an actor it was - as an assistant producer at one of the wealthy german theatres: I was interviewed about my motivation by one of the honorable state agents: “Nothing for a narcissist like you! “ he judged.

And he was right, was right in Frankfurt a.M., 1993...

Eugene T. Gendlin writes in “Focusing - how to gain direct access to your body’s knowledge” :

“Focusing and Listening are like that, like talking to a person who makes your experience expand. In Focusing you must be that kind of person within yourself. And you can also be that way with others, and show them how to be that way for you. “